To provide a means of communicating to a user the full functionality of a microprocessor-based postage meter or other kinds of mailing equipment, it is known in the art to provide a user interface, including a menu system, on a video display provided with the mailing equipment. But in the prior art, the user interface for a mailing apparatus, including menus, and also the function calls associated with different menu selections, are embedded in a control program for the postage meter, i.e., in the machine language instructions that control the mailing apparatus. This arrangement has the advantage of, usually, requiring less memory to hold a user interface and associated function calls. It also has the feature of nearly guaranteeing that a non-programmer, such as a general user, will not alter a user interface.
The change-resistant feature of a user interface is, today, in some situations, a disadvantage. Today, mailing equipment that is the same in functionality is sold worldwide; the user interface for the mailing equipment must therefore be adapted, or customized, to the language and culture associated with each market and also adapted to conform to the postal system requirements of each market. With the arrangement of the prior art, the control program must therefore often be changed for different markets.
Any change to a computer program, including the control program of a mailing equipment, has risk, time and cost associated with the change. There is risk in that even small changes to a computer program can have unforeseen consequences. There is time and cost in that a change must be made by relatively sophisticated programmers. After a change, there is inventory cost in keeping and maintaining both the original and the changed versions for each country, i.e. in providing configuration management, this cost being relatively high because relatively sophisticated programmers must perform the configuration management.
What is needed is a way of altering a user interface without changing the control program itself, i.e., the coded machine instructions, but instead changing only the input data for the control program. A change along these lines would be to provide as input data to the control program the text to be displayed as part of the user interface. Then the text could be easily translated, depending on the market for the mailing equipment.
But in fully responding to the risk and cost of altering a control program, providing a user translation of the text of a user interface is often not enough. A menu system, and a user interface generally, makes use of various assumptions about how people will respond to an interface screen; and how people respond can vary dramatically from culture to culture, to the point where, for some markets, some assumptions about a user interface are simply incorrect, and the user interface does not work for that market.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved control system that provides for a flexible and adaptable user interface, while mitigating the disadvantages discussed above.